Bitcasa Debuts CloudFS, An “iCloud In A Box” For Developers

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Former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield company Bitcasa, is today rolling out an offering to developers called CloudFS, which effectively makes the Bitcasa consumer service available via APIs, allowing developers to take advantage of the platform in their own applications in an unbranded way. Companies including Plex and Cloudless are already early adopters of the new platform, says Bitcasa.

According to CEO Brian Taptich, the company already has 5,000 developers signed up on a developer offering launched last November, but what they were hearing from their developer customers is that what they really wanted was not something that was similar to the other cloud service providers and APIs already available on the market – they wanted something they could use which would appear to their end users as if it was their own brand.

The API functionality includes a number of features, including file management, file sharing, media transcoding, and zero-knowledge encryption, all on public cloud storage. Additionally, the company is offering nine pre-built applications, alongside its Bitcasa “Turn-key Drive,” saving developers development time. And developers using Bitcasa’s CloudFS APIs service, also get complete access to AWS and other cloud service providers through the platform.

“If you think about a company like Evernote or Dropbox, their skill set isn’t managing backend storage, it’s creating really great consumer experiences” Taptich explains. Now, he says, the company wants to enable the next generation of developers, who don’t want to bother with the overhead, time and the energy required to build out their own public cloud.

“This is iCloud in a box,” he says.

The CEO notes that the new developer platform isn’t a pivot for the company, and that the consumer-facing Bitcasa app which now has over a million users isn’t going away – this is instead just about expanding Bitcasa’s capabilities to a developer audience. Other customers which the company can’t detail by name include mobile operators, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, who want their own competitive offerings to take on those from big companies like Google (Google Drive) or Apple (iCloud), for example.

Bitcasa is making the API documentation available today, but the APIs will not launch into closed beta until the end of the month. That will be followed by a formal beta this summer, Taptich says.

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OverviewBitcasa makes public cloud storage simple. Its Cloud Storage Platform APIs and branded applications provide plug and play solutions for easy file storage, access, and sharing across all major platforms including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and the Web. Bitcasa has helped thousands of developers, OEMs, and service providers in more than 140 countries manage their data, and is backed by top-tier …